An aura of fairytale surrounds Gardiner's Island, a glow of storybook mystery that emanates across the water of Gardiner's Bay, carried on the wind in the direction of all four points of the compass, like the soft fragrance of shad blossoms: fleeting, vaguely almond-scented, enigmatic.
I'm glad Gardiner's Island has remained in private hands. Is that wrong? Let it abide there, floating in time.
Oddly, I've never set foot on Gardiner's Island proper, despite the fact that I grew up — as the fish hawk flies — almost as close as any interloper could, on the sandy southern curve of Gardiner's Bay, in our little wind-wracked house between the defunct and funky-smelling Smith Meal factory at Promised Land and the defunct but picturesque chimney smokestack over by the Devon Yacht Club. My brother had some sort of caretaking job on Gardiner's Island at some point in the 1980s, too, and my grandmother Jeannette before that had a bickering, love/hate (rather more loathe, I believe) acquaintance with the former lord of the manor, Robert D.L. Gardiner. The gamekeeper — or whatever his estate title may have been, I've forgotten — used to send our family the carcass of a deer, one of those culled to keep the population of the island herd down, for us to butcher and dine on; it would be strung up, gutted, and bled in our barn here in the village and then made into nice, savory venison stews with red wine. I would brag about eating venison at school.
That was back when the numbers of deer were few enough around here that the gift of a dead one might represent a treat for carnivore neighbors. Not many East Hamptoners left would clap their hands upon the delivery of a dead buck. Hardly anyone goes out on the water of Gardiner's Bay any more, either.
It is one of the whimpering ironies of life on the South Fork in 2025 that today, despite the flood tide of people who crush eastward along County Road 39 in their absolutely adorable custom-rebuilt vintage Ford Broncos, so few seem to take any interest whatsoever in the main attraction: the water that surrounds us. We used to frolic as kids on the beach in front of the house on Cranberry Hole Road for days and days and days on end, jinxing the power-boaters and water skiers because we found their noisy presence an intrusion on our private idyll. That hardly happens any longer because, despite the tenfold increase in population, few residents or visitors venture out on boats. Even Jet Skis are not a very common sight on the southern side of Gardiner's Bay.
When my father was alive, in the 1970s, we used to sometimes sail out in our catboat, a flat-bottomed craft well suited for a shallow sandy bay, and have a picnic on Cartwright Shoal, which the proprietors of Gardiner's Island I believe still claim as their own. It felt naughty to picnic on that extended sandbar with no one but a few friends and seagulls for company. We took a small portable charcoal grill. The island caretakers could smell our lamb brochettes grilling on wind from the south on an August afternoon. We dug, of course, for Captain Kidd's treasure.
As I've mentioned before in this column, it is the ghost of Captain Kidd that adds an extra special flavor of the exotic and of legend to the landscape of Promised Land. I still feel, like a proprietary 6-year-old drawing a boundary in the sand with a stick to claim neighborhood territory in her own name, that if anyone is ever to unearth Kidd's hidden cache of Ottoman emeralds, it ought to be me. We view Gardiner's Island only from a distance, picking out the landmarks that dot the vista like outsize icons on a pirate treasure map: the Ruins of Fort Tyler, both scenic and another riddle (owing to the vagueness of our collective memories of the Spanish-American War) and the white windmill, built by a Dominy, the color of which, standing out from the surrounding green, creates a magnifying mirage effect that makes it visible from many miles farther off than you'd expect.
I myself can recall the appearance of the late Robert David Lion Gardiner (1911-2004) as he was in life: ruddy, wearing a navy blazer (indeed! Like Thurston Howell the Third) with an actual gold crest and gold buttons, but with dirty fingernails. I must have gawked at his hands when I went to his house on Main Street in the village that one time when he hosted a reception for students admitted to Columbia University. I was 16 and remember gawking, impressed but also critical of the weirdness of it all, at the portrait of his redheaded wife by Salvador Dali that hung in the dark dining room. I'm not in any position to make snide remarks about eccentrics and cranks, being pro-eccentric in my belief system and perhaps being a bit of one myself, but nevertheless, I feel it is fair game to laugh a bit — lightly, let's not overdo it — at the gold-buttoned airs the lord of the manor gave himself, mocked in whispers once he'd left the room, as villagers have done since time immemorial.
We play foolish tricks on ourselves when we take too much pride in our genealogy, mathematically speaking. As I keep obnoxiously informing anyone who brings up some impressive antecedent, if you trace your roots back far enough, 12 generations, we all have something like 8,190 great-grandparents. We're all related to Daniel Boone or descended tangentially from John Hancock . . . but also to the 8,189 nameless other ancestors we choose to forget. Bloodlines become meaningless, if we could only be honest with ourselves. Nevertheless I will take this opportunity to hypocritically point out that one of my great-great-whatever-grandmothers was a Gardiner of Gardiner's Island, too, who came off the island to marry down in Amagansett. There. Take that, Bobby Gardiner!